A slide purportedly leaked from AMD suggests that AMD Ryzen 5000 processors will support faster memory. The slides detail the new DDR4-4000 standard, the so-called sweet spot of memory performance, and AMD Ryzen gaming PCs will crave even faster memory in the next generation.

AMD's Ryzen CPUs tend to be very responsive to faster memory than their Intel counterparts, but there is a limit to how much performance can be gained by speeding up memory before performance is compromised by system latency. Let me explain: Ryzen 3000 processors have a "sweet spot" where the infinity fabric clock (fclk), memory controller clock (uclk), and memory clock (mclk) are in a 1:1:1 ratio. The optimal speed to reliably achieve this with existing Ryzen chips is 3,600MHz DDR4, but occasionally we see up to 3,733MHz recommended.

The impact of memory speed on latency is discussed in Chris Szewczyk's recent article "Does RAM Speed Matter for Gaming? But basically, if you increase the memory speed significantly above 3,600 MHz on an AMD Ryzen 3000 chip, you can expect latency to increase.

According to leaked slides from Technopat (via WCCFTech), AMD Ryzen 5000 chips can run DDR4-4000 memory and still stay in the sweet spot of fast, low-latency performance. While not a huge improvement in compatibility, it will be cheaper than ever to get a fast dual-channel kit, as memory manufacturers are producing kits at 5,000 MHz and above. [Especially with AMD Ryzen, faster memory makes for a more comfortable gaming PC.

Other slides from Technopat, and purportedly from AMD, provide further evidence that the AMD Ryzen 5000 has a performance lead over Intel's Comet Lake in gaming, and that support for AMD 400 series boards will be added to the BIOS update in the form of a BIOS update in January 2021.

All of this remains unconfirmed for now, but we won't have to wait long to learn more: the AMD Ryzen 5000 processors will be available on November 5, starting with the Ryzen 9 5950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X.